When skiing, all our movements and actions are developed in space and time in an indivisible manner. Spatiality is about the perception used in understanding and adapting our body to the surrounding space. It is the relationship between comprehending and experiencing our body with space, with other people, and with objects that circumscribe it. The different brain areas process space through spatial dimensions as depth, height, and width.
Spatiality is the motor interaction amplitude that shapes our behavior when skiing. It is the place in which we are situated and our maneuvers take place. We move because of space and can occupy it with different postures, movements, and actions. These motions are performed from a starting point to an arrival point and our trajectories, straight or curved, originate various and continuous spatial states where time is manifesting itself among these. Poincaré manifested that imagining a point in space is imagining the movement needed to reach it.
Space is composed of references to objects and features of the area where our actions develop. To evaluate our surrounding space, we rely on references offered by gravity perception, by self-perception, and by the perception of the upright, which is the direction objects are perceived as vertical. To represent the surrounding space, we employ references as verticality, horizontality, obliquity, and depth. Due to slope inclination, certain skiers perceive space as a stressful vacuity.
Our skiing spatial reality depends at the same time on our sensory set, but also on our motor instruments (muscles and joints), and an omnipresent force which is gravity. The coordination of these factors allows us getting a body perception in itself and a body movement perception, representing the essential information for space unification where activities take place (Paillard, 1985).
In skiing we individualize space and orientation mainly through vision: to visually anticipateis to locate ourselves in a future space. Spatiality is the visual knowledge that we acquire in relation to the space that surrounds us. Performing a technical action is aiming it at a point in space and to that, our brain space management mechanisms are used. In the beginner skier, one of his performing difficulties of the technical movements is not caused by motor deficits but because of a temporary inability to act in space.
In our brain activity, space and time sequences are usually correlated with measures of distance and duration. The hippocampus is the cerebral area that maps locations, i.e., it is our brain´s representation of space (Eichenbaum, 2017). It also has a critical role in learning and memory. The parahippocampal cortex is activated when seen in spatial scenes.
Time cells function as time representing memory, delivering another dimension to spatial mapping as they fire together with place cells. Place cells contribute to spatial perception, providing information based on environmental cues or landmarks, facilitating our conception of ‘place’, and forming a space map by firing in different places.
Apart from place cells, other spatial neurons have been discovered like grid cells, providing distance information; head-direction cells helping encoding motion by firing on the direction our head is oriented in space; and border cells, indicating spatial boundaries.
According to these considerations, you can apply the following recommendations in your own skiing:
- Remember that spatiality is the motor interaction amplitude that shapes your behavior when skiing.
- When you imagine a point in a slope, then imagine the movements needed to reach it.
- In some situations, due to slope inclination, you may perceive the space as a stressful vacuity.
- To locate yourself in a future space while projecting your trajectory, you will have to visually anticipatethat space.
- If you are a beginner skier, one of your performing difficulties may not be caused by technical deficits but because of your inability to act properly in the slope’s space.
